With a last yearning glance at the lights on the upper harbour she returned to the house and to bed. In the morning she waited tranquilly for Richard Hansyke’s arrival. He came about noon and took her back to Roxborough the same day.
6
A week later he offered her Archie Roxby as a husband. Mary greeted the suggestion with a gurgle of laughter, thinking of Archie Roxby’s hake-like face and solemn gait.
“You needn’t marry him if you don’t want to,” her father said patiently. “But I’d advise you to think before you refuse him. Your mother—or shall we say I by marrying her?—has rather spoiled your chances among our pious neighbours. Piety has become the fashion since I was young. Your escapades haven’t helped you. You’re going to be good-looking too, which makes things worse, since I can’t afford to show you. Archie Roxby is of your own class, not your mother’s. He has a certain amount of money, though God knows how much. His own bailiff doesn’t. He’s my age, and brandy is his only vice. He’ll die of it before you’re old enough to be irked by him. Think it over, Mary.”
The conversation took place in Mary’s bedroom, and she sat silent for a long time. Glancing round her room, she wondered whether it remembered a word once repeated to it so many times that its walls might retain some faint echo. The involuntary image made her wince. She spoke hurriedly.
“What shall I do if I stay here?”
Richard Hansyke shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? Marry elsewhere. Grow into an old maid and bring up thirty cats, like your Aunt Sophy, on the strictest principles of morality. Take to religion. I don’t know. What could you do, Mary?”
Mary sat with a still face, thinking over her chances of escape. They seemed poor. “What exactly is marriage:” she asked next
Her father looked at her curiously. “Ask Miss Flora. I can’t tell you. Marriage is the most intimate of all relationships.”
“Should I like being intimate with Archie Roxby?”
“I don’t suppose so. But do you know any one with whom you would?”
“No,” Mary said loudly.
“Very well. And since all intimacy, however pleasurable at first, in the end becomes wearisome, you might as well start with disillusionment. It will save you a later shock.”
A powerful instinct assured her that he was wrong. She knew, in her own active pulsing young.body, that there was an answer to Richard Hansyke but she did not know what it was. Again, a memory alarmed her by its power to stab. She thought: “This won’t do. You’re not going to miss a chance by being faint-hearted. You must get out.”
“I’ll take him,” she said.
Richard Hansyke complimented her dryly and left her to her thoughts.
Archie Roxby paid his respects the following day. Mary stifled an impulse to laughter that seized her when she saw him coming, his long body cased in black and his face composed to an expression of ardour. It vanished as he straightened himself after bending over her hand. He smothered a groan. To Mary’s polite inquiry he answered: “My kidneys are out of order. I have a pain in my back.”
“I am sorry,” Mary said.
Archie sat down carefully. “I suffer a good deal,” he said complacently. “I have an excess of bile which affects the liver and that in turn puts a strain on the kidneys. My stomach is slightly inflamed too, and I have a crackling of the joints. I sometimes wake up at night thinking I hear shots, but it is only my own knees. You will soon grow used to it. My back is, however, very painful. If you will excuse me I will go home and my sister-in-law will iron it. I ought not to be out at all, but I naturally wished to see you and express my satisfaction in your goodness.”
“Oh, don’t go yet,” Mary cried. “I haven’t asked you any of my questions.”
Archie sat down again with reluctant courtesy.
“In the first place,” Mary said, “are your eldest brother and his wife going to go on living with you when I marry you?”
Archie looked surprised. “Certainly,” he said. “Unless you feel strongly that they should not. I am sure you would find my sister-in-law a true friend and adviser. She prefers moral worth and intelligence to worldly considerations in the connections she forms. This is a rare opportunity for you.”
“Oh, very well,” Mary said “I dare say she will be useful, if your back needs ironing very often.”
“But my wife will naturally do that,” Archie protested. “And now if you will forgive me———”
Mary was a little daunted by her future responsibilities, but she summoned up spirit to ask if she would be allowed opportunity to carry on her studies. The idea had filled her mind lately that she might become a great scholar instead of a ship builder. To be sure, she had little inclination for study of an abstract sort, but she thought she might acquire it. She proposed to Archie Roxby that Wagener should live with them too.
“Certainly,” said Archie. “Is he any good with monkeys?”
“I don’t think so,” Mary answered, surprised in her turn.
“A pity. My sister-in-law has six, and they are often ailing. I believe she coddles them too much. But it’s impossible to argue with her. She can’t keep to one subject long enough. I must go now. Forgive an inadequate bow. My kidneys. I am very sensible of your goodness. I firmly believe you to be one of the very best of women and eminently deserving of the highest respect and affection. Good-bye.”
He took his leave, with a succession of loud cracks, and Mary rushed to fling herself into Wagener’s arms, in a paroxysm of mirth, of which, remembering Archie’s concluding phrase, she was a little ashamed. Wagener scolded her. “You are nothing but a great boy,” he said. “And you’re to be married in a month.”
Mary looked at him soberly, and was quieter at once.
7
Her marriage night filled in the gaps in her father’s explanation and almost stunned her with shame and mortification. Archie Roxby proved himself a clumsy and inconsiderate lover, and Mary lay awake the whole night, bruised in mind and wretched in body. Daylight had slipped like an ailing ghost into the shuttered room before she was calm enough to sleep. “You certainly are not a little girl now,” she said fiercely. “You’re fifteen years old, and a woman of experience. You haven’t got much left to learn. You’re a little dazed, I think. Come now, Mary Roxby isn’t going to cry because she knows more of life and men than Mary Hansyke did. At any rate you know the worst, and you must just stiffen your back and get what you can out of this marriage you’ve let yourself in for. I wish I could run away.” She crept out of bed and opened first a shutter and then a window. The clean cool air comforted her burning head, and after a while she fell asleep, her cheek pressed against the oak window seat.
She discovered later that she had not known the worst, for on the next night Archie drank himself into semi-consciousness to get rid of an inexplicable sense of shame. Mary was too frightened by his appearance when he entered her room to realise that his state was her best protection. She got away from him as soon as she could, leaving him sound asleep, and ran to Wagener’s room. The tutor was sitting on the edge of his bed, examining the stops of his flute. He held the distracted girl in his arms while she poured out her story, shivering with cold and terror, and sobbing in a very desolate fashion. When she had talked herself silent, he wrapped her up in his quilt and stood over her grimly.
“This won’t do, Mary,” he said. “You can do better than this. What do you want me to do for you? Run away with you? A nice pair we should make, shouldn’t we? Do you see yourself living in an attic in Endymion Road with the poor tutor? You don’t. You shouldn’t have come to me. There are some things no one can protect you from, or help you through. About those things you mustn’t talk. Do you understand? You must never never give yourself away like this to any one again. It’s not—dignified, and it weakens you. Do you see? Drink this and get back to your room.”
He gave her a drink of brandy and held the door open for her to go. She paused in the doorway to kiss him on his mouth. His lips wer
e cold and did not return the pressure of hers.
“You are my friend, aren’t you?” she asked piteously.
“Till death, Mary.”
On her way back to her room she met one of her sister-in-law’s monkeys. The poor beast was very cold and ran beside her with chattering teeth to the door of her bedroom. She buttoned it into one of her jackets and shut it out. It scratched on the panels of the door and whimpered at the keyhole. “Not like a lost soul,” Mary thought, “because it hasn’t one. Perhaps it’s crying for one.” She worried about it until she fell asleep. When she woke up the room was full of sunshine, and her spirits revived because she was so young that they could not remain in the depths for long. She recalled Wagener’s words and thought: “I’ve learned another lesson. Apparently there’s always something left to learn.”
Archie Roxby was full of compunction. Taking himself in hand he gave up the rôle of husband altogether, and treating Mary as if she were an undisciplined daughter, set himself to teach her what he considered a more correct attitude to life. Grateful for kindness, she tried to compose her speech and gestures to his ideal of breeding and succeeded so far that she developed an impulsive grace of movement.
She was too young not to take her revenge by laughing at him. She mimicked him to Wagener with a broad humour that made him laugh until they fell into each other’s arms in uncontrollable mirth.
A month after their marriage Archie took her to London, and she discovered another side of the odd creature she had married.
William Palmer was being tried at the Old Bailey for poisoning. Archie attended the trial from the first day, leaving Mary alone in their hotel, and when he came back at night he described the day’s proceedings with the gestures of an inspired puppet. “I don’t want you to miss it all,” he said generously. He reclined on their bed and imitated the victim snapping at a spoonful of toast and water to wash down the pills. He snapped, jerking his head and neck forward like a chicken, at the glass that held a “certain dark liquid.” Dark liquid, Mary. Mark that.” After that, he sat up suddenly, screaming “Murder, murder!” and beat the bed with his hands, his eyes starting out of his head. On the second day, the surgeon said that the body of the murdered man was twisted back like a bow, and Archie writhed on the bed in the contortions of death. On the third day he came home full of the postmortem and the opening of the stomach by a medical student with much horse-play and suspicious circumstance. The fourth day produced the analogous case of Mrs Serjeantson Smith who died of strychnia, screaming, with her feet turned inwards. This evoked a dumb show from Archie that made Mary scream herself, with fright, but Archie was too preoccupied to feel pity for her. Later he paused in his impersonation of a man dangling from a noose. Mary had fainted. He picked her up and laid her on the bed. When she came round, he was looking at her so reproachfully that she was moved to apologise for herself.
“Never mind, never mind,” he said petulantly, “You’ve spoiled the whole thing. No, I couldn’t finish it now. I’ve lost the spirit.” He sat down dejectedly to file his nails, a practice to which he devoted much time, sometimes filing Mary’s for her, or operating on the paws of his sister-in-law’s monkeys.
At the end of another month Mary wanted to go back to Roxborough. London was hot and she felt curiously languid, a strange condition, unknown in her experience. Archie refused to leave London. He said he needed new clothes and took Mary with him to Mr Moses in New Oxford Street where he had himself measured for a dozen suits. He was fastidious about cut, and the fittings occupied several mornings. When at last all were finished he prepared to celebrate his triumph by putting on one of the new suits and taking Mary to Surrey Gardens. Mary was tired and watched without interest Archie becoming more and more stately as the long evening passed into night. It was only when he made dignified advances to a marble goddess on a pedestal that she realised he was completely drunk. Frightened and angry, she tried to persuade him to come back to the hotel. A crowd gathered and Mary heard several unfavourable comments on her conduct. One woman said she had driven the poor gentleman mad by her cruelty: another suggested a ducking. Looking round in despair, she caught sight of a familiar face. At the same moment she felt a faintness seizing on her limbs. She staggered a few steps from love’s frenzied slave and fell at Mrs Maggs’s feet. Her last conscious thought was that her hoop had swung over her head, leaving her underneath, like a dead rat in a barrel.
When she came to herself she had a momentary bewildered sense of waking from a dream. She was in Mrs Maggs’s kitchen and the thin woman was bending over the fire. Of course, she had come in to have supper with Mrs Maggs because Charlotte was out. She was only a little girl waiting for her mother. She uttered a cry of relief. Mrs Maggs looked round, and simultaneously Mary knew that she had not been dreaming. Tears of disappointment oozed under her lids and Mrs Maggs wiped them away with the oven cloth.
“Poor worm,” said Mrs Maggs. “It’s a shame to treat you so, and you in the way of a family. I hope he’s married you lawfully. Men are the meanest creatures God made and will slip out of everything you haven’t got them tied hand and foot to.”
“I suppose you’re not Mrs Maggs now,” Mary murmured. Some tremendous fact had just been thrust at her mind, which refused to accept it. She tried to think what it could be.
“In a manner of speaking,” the thin woman acknowledged, “not. But you don’t change your nature with your name. Maggs I was for twenty years and Maggs I am—to my friends. Which I hope I may count you as a link, my dear.”
“Mrs Maggs.” Mary sat bolt upright on the narrow couch. “Did you say I was going to have a baby?”
“Bless me, didn’t you know it?” Mrs Maggs said comfortably. “Well, the ways of the Lord are indeed unscrutinised.”
Mary sank back. “That’s finished you,” she said to herself. “I shall never get away from Archie.” A grim satisfaction in the completeness with which she had been caught in the machinery of life, followed her first dismay.
“I’m not done for yet,” she informed Mrs Maggs.
“Of course not,” the thin woman comforted her. “And no reason why you should be. All these things are sent to try us. Your poor mother went through it, after all.”
“I’ve lost my mother,” Mary said. A desire to cry over her lonely state seized her. She felt that it was ridiculous and lay staring at a print of The Young Queen until its placid virginity restored her to calm. She had walked confidently out to Lincthorn Road during Archie’s first day at the Old Bailey, only to be told that Charlotte had never been near her old friend. A round of the shops she had visited with her mother was no more fruitful, except to the shopkeepers, who produced old bills which Mary paid. It was the only use to which she put the money Archie had given her, feeling a sort of delicacy about spending it on herself.
Mrs Maggs was sorry for her. She gave her friendly advice and Mary accepted it gratefully. Mrs. Maggs’s records overflowed with the catastrophes of friends who had neglected her warnings and died in agony thinking the nurse the Devil, and growing restive at the wholesale massacre, Mary said she must go back to her hotel. “George shall drive you there in his cab,” Mrs Maggs cried. She disappeared, and a moment or two later produced George and his cab with the pleased air of a conjuror. The cab lurched off and Mary had a panic-stricken moment during which she felt that she was losing her only friend. The cabman was even more melancholy than when he drove her and Charlotte from Islington. When they reached Mary’s hotel he leaned on the door of his cab and said mysteriously: “I don’t bear you any grudge. No. But what I say is there’s companionships that’s worse than loneliness, and if ever I take into my hand the wherewithal to end my forsworn days, and my hand—as it naturally might at such a dreadful moment—slips, it will be due to that trunk of yours and the fish I was beguiled by. I dare say we got to come to it, but why? Why?”
Mary thanked him and left him still musing on the inexplicable problem of existence. She went up to her room and spent a
long time praying. “It may not do any good,” she thought, “but I need all the help I can get.” In the morning she felt an extraordinary assurance of being strong enough to deal with anything. She took this as a proof of the validity of religion, and Miss Flora’s teachings acquired in her pupil’s mind a sacramental value they never wholly lost. About noon Archie returned, and she greeted him cheerfully.
“You’ve ruined your new suit,” she observed. “Did you sleep under some one’s bed? It looks like it.”
Archie’s face puckered childishly, and to comfort him Mary brushed and sponged him into a presentable state and took him out for a walk. She behaved like a tomboy and climbed to the top of a bus by the iron ladder. Her crinoline swayed out with such disgraceful effect that a lady inside the bus fainted in self-protection and Archie became crimson with mortification. Mary took no notice of him. She lolled back in the seat with her feet against the parapet of the bus and laughed loudly at everything that amused her.
“You’d better lower me over the side by ropes, if you feel like that about it,” she said callously. Archie suffered agonies of shame on the descent and once back in the hotel he announced his intention of returning to Roxborough the next day. Mary concealed her pleasure. She wanted Archie to think that he was punishing her for her good. A dim resentment against his power over her stirred in her mind, and she wondered if it would ever be possible for a man and a woman to live together in a state of friendly respect. It was a useless train of thought and she abandoned it.
The thought struck her that if she had married the boy whose form and features were growing day by day more indistinct in her memory, she would not have cared whether she was his equal or not. They would neither of them have thought about it at all. . . .
Chapter Two
1
Roxby House was large enough to have housed all four Roxby brothers, with their wives and dependents. Archie lived in a wing of fifteen rooms divided from the rest of the house by a gallery and a hall. In the other larger part lived the eldest brother and his wife, his second wife. George Roxby was very fat and had to be braced with a kind of steel framework into which his man inserted him every day. His groans during this operation echoed through the house. He became very fond of Mary and his wrinkled jovial face shone like a turnip lantern when she came to visit him.
The Lovely Ship Page 8